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Paratextual Marketing in Delarivier Manley's Early Career View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Humanities Commons “She writes like a Woman”: Paratextual Marketing in Delarivier Manley’s Early Career KATE OZMENT1 Abstract: Delarivier Manley has long been discussed as a sensational and successful Tory political satirist of the early eighteenth century. In the late seventeenth century, however, she associated with Whigs, experimented with genres, and tested different techniques for marketing her texts. Mimicking the methods of celebrity actresses, Manley used paratextual addresses to engage public interest in a carefully curated identity, creating a commodity in her persona that she would employ throughout her career. This paper traces her developing persona in her first three publications: Letters Writen by Mrs. Manley, The Lost Lover, and The Royal Mischief. Although these texts are not explicitly political satire, they nevertheless explicate the preliminary and halting machinations of an astute businesswoman and the marketing tactics Manley would employ throughout her career. The result is a more complete and nuanced picture of Manley’s commercial authorship. Contributor Biography: Kate Ozment is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Texas A&M University specializing in eighteenth-century British literature and book history. Her dissertation reconsiders paradigms of book history scholarship to account for the intersectional identities of its human actors, specifically advocating for feminist bibliography as an interrogation of traditional bibliographic questions of authority and agency that must be complicated and expanded in light of feminist theory and literary studies. She uses female commercial authors as case studies for theorizing women’s book history. In 1696, Delarivier Manley made her debut in the London literary marketplace with the publication of familiar letters and two plays; by 1697, she had disappeared and would not return in earnest for almost a decade. The halting beginning of Manley’s authorial career has provoked speculation as to why the woman who would become a dedicated and successful pamphleteer, essayist, and satirist in the early eighteenth century would have had so little interest in maintaining her burgeoning celebrity in the late Restoration. Manley’s departure was marked by the performance of The Female Wits (1696), an anonymous comedy that satirized her character along with fellow playwrights Mary Pix and Catherine Trotter. Consequently, a predominant theory is that this play was “destructive to the women playwrights’ careers, forcing Manley from the stage, and chasing Pix and Trotter to other houses,” as Jane Milling has summarized (119–120).2 More recent studies that examine Manley’s career as a whole have usefully 1 Many thanks to Margaret J. M. Ezell and Mary Ann O’Farrell for their guidance on earlier drafts of this project. Archival research was supported by the University of Chicago through the Robert L. Platzman Memorial Fellowship. 2 Milling usefully sets up this debate before positing her own argument—that the satire was of the theatre, not just the playwrights. Ozment, Kate. “‘She writes like a Woman’: Paratextual Marketing in Delarivier Manley’s Early Career.” Authorship 5.1 (2016). Web: http://www.authorship.ugent.be Ozment 2 questioned this conclusion. The woman who would go on to publish the infamous Court Intrigues as a Collection of Original Letters from the Island of the New Atalantis (1711) would hardly be chastised enough to leave professional writing if her arrest after The New Atalantis’s publication did not deter her from writing three additional volumes. Why, then, would Manley vacate a social and literary position that was by most accounts growing in prominence if only to start over again later? The most compelling argument belongs to Rachel Carnell and Ruth Herman, who both conclude that the gap between the 1696 texts and the 1707 publication of the first section of The New Atalantis and Almyna, a play, was precipitated by Manley’s relationship with John Tilly.3 As his mistress and coconspirator in various financial schemes, she had alternative methods of gaining financial support, if not stability, during this period.4 These conclusions cast Manley as a writer whose primary motivation for entering into the literary market was financial, and it is an impulse that would not have wanted throughout her life. Later in Manley’s career, her financial motivations led her to politics, and much of the scholarship on Manley has focused on her identity as a political writer in the early eighteenth century. This focus is not without warrant; she gained significant fame from assisting Jonathan Swift with the production of the Examiner (1710–1715) in 1711 and publishing The New Atalantis, Adventures of Rivella (1714), and multiple pamphlets that leveled their critique at Whig politics and various social gossip. In contrast, Manley’s 1696 publications are disparate and unconnected. They include Letters Writen by Mrs. Manley (1696), a prose piece that largely refrains from political commentary, and The Lost Lover (1696) and The Royal Mischief (1696), plays that have been read politically but are not satirical and do not directly critique current public figures. Perhaps due to this deviation in authorial motivation or its comparatively modest success, Manley’s early work is understudied in comparison to what followed. While The Royal Mischief has attracted a fair amount of interest due to the desiring gaze of its female protagonist and proto-feminist overtones, both Letters and The Lost Lover are scarcely mentioned outside of the long-ranging studies by Herman and Carnell.5 3 The first version of The New Atalantis was included with Memoirs of the Court of England under the title The Lady’s Pacquet of Letters, Taken from her by a French Privateer in her Passage to Holland. Suppos’d to be Written by Several Men of Quality. Brought over from St. Malo’s by an English Office at the last Exchange of Prisoners. The same year, Manley published Almyna, a tragedy. This gap in her publications is not absolute, as Manley contributed a poem to The Nine Muses in 1700. 4 Her financial support was not wholly reliable, as Manley and Tilly were involved in several legal scuffles as they attempted various ways of providing a living. These schemes replaced Manley’s writing career. 5 For an illustrative example of the divide between Manley’s early and late career, cf. Paula McDowell’s seminal The Women of Grub Street, in which the chapter on Manley does not include a discussion of her early work, instead picking up with The New Atalantis. Ozment 3 Compounding this divide is that Manley never became a dramatic sensation like Aphra Behn, nor even as prolific as her contemporaries, Trotter and Pix. But, with her roman à clefs of The New Atalantis and Adventures of Rivella in the 1700s, she was a prolific and notorious major figure. However, I argue that the “increasingly shrewd businesswoman” of the eighteenth century was not born in 1707, as most scholarship implies (cf. McDowell 231); she started in 1696 with a surreptitious collection of letters and a failure and moderate success at the playhouse. While Manley’s early career was “experimental, both in the genres she chose, the literary conventions she revised, and in the persons from whom she sought patronage”, she was unwavering in viewing publication as a business and her work and commercial persona as commodities (Carnell 85). These preliminary publications are the product of a commercial author whose identity was still in flux, and they elucidate the beginnings of her commercial tactics. Commercial Personae and the Female Playwright In the late 1690s, Manley, Pix, and Trotter briefly created a network of female playwrights who adopted Behn’s explicitly feminine commercial authorship.6 They exchanged dedicatory verses that framed each other’s work as successors to the dominant literary women of the Restoration. In Trotter’s Agnes de Castro (1695), an adaptation of Behn’s novel of the same name, Manley inscribes “Orinda, and the Fair Astrea gone,” referring to Behn and Katherine Philips, with Trotter as their replacement on “the Vacant Throne” (“To the Author”). Their mutual support quickly faded, but Manley continued to use a paratextual methodology that relied on her identity as a woman and a commercial author. In addition to these poems, Manley included prefaces and letters to the reader to present a persona that would put forward a seemingly authentic reaction to public opinion or explain the motivation behind authorial decisions, often using her identity as a woman author to sensational and material advantage. Manley used the guise of authenticity provided by paratextual addresses to engage public interest in a carefully curated identity, creating a commodity in her persona that she would employ throughout her career. By the mid-1710s, Manley’s persona was well established and of interest to the reading public. She was a “literary chameleon of sorts, capable of modifying her self-representations to suit her readers’ tastes” (McDowell 231). She was even popular enough that she had to intervene to write Rivella herself when notorious fictional biographer Charles Gildon and publisher 6 See Milling’s “The Female Wits” pg. 120–21. Ozment 4 Edmund Curll attempted to capitalized on popular interest in her history by producing a possibly unfavorable version of her life and works.7 The construction of this voice and rhetorical flair in the 1696 publications is crucial for understanding Manley’s commercial methodology. Arguably, her persona already originated in the surreptitiously published Letters, which was conveniently put out on the market the month before Manley’s first play. Her plays extended the interest in her private identity to an explicitly public persona that anticipated and quickly adapted to the changing public opinion and reception of her work. The prefatory epistles evoke a textual version of her identity that perpetuates public discourse and frames reception for its readers by offering a reaction to criticism or praise.
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